The Educated Marketer

20 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website

You’ve worked hard to provide valuable content on your website, how do you plan to drive more prospective students and their parents to your website?

Inbound marketing and an effective website go hand-in-hand. The rise of college websites has made all the difference for prospective students. They went from a world where all the information about colleges was located in the library or in the file folders full of viewbooks and brochures that were handed to them at college fairs to a world where all the information (and much more) contained in those papers was at their fingertips 24/7, first on home computers, and now on mobile devices.But all the work you put into providing all the most relevant information on your website is useless if you don’t work just as hard to drive traffic to your website.

Here are 20 ways to increase your traffic:

Regularly update your content. The frequency with which you post will be different for everyone, but according to Hubspot, those that updated their blog 16x a month had 3.5x more traffic than those who only updated 0-4 times a month.

Use a service like Pingler to ping your website or blog. When you ping your website, you are sending a notification to other sites that you have updated your web content. It’s basically an SEO tactic that will make you rank higher on search engine results.

Use keywords effectively. Research which words will resonate with your audience and make sure to include variations of the same words in your URL, blog post title, image description and throughout the post.

Submit articles and blog posts into directories. This will ensure your content shows up in several different places on the web and can be more easily found through internet searches. If a reader stumbles across your content and finds it useful, they are likely to click on a link back to your website to explore more.

Create community forums on your site. These could be places for students to connect and meet their peers, form study groups or even take full college courses. Drexel University created this math forum.

Make your content easily shareable on Twitter, FB, Pinterest, etc. Add quick share buttons to the top of each and every blog post.

Optimize your website for mobile devices. According to com, 97% of students have accessed a college website via their mobile device, so adapting your site is crucial. Entrepreneur provides ten questions to help you plan your mobile site.

Link to outside sources (the more traffic they get, the better)

Link internally to past blog posts for context when writing new ones

Create shareable content like infographics, slide shares, etc.

Use metadata to tag and describe your content accurately

Host a contest and give away a prize

Follow and interact with other sites and blogs

Interview industry thought leaders on your site. Name recognition will drive more readers to your site and it’s likely they will share the interview as well